I need to come up with a way to determine the appropriate range for a countif function. The column is known and unchanging, the row number depends on how many items there were in the previous category.

For example: I would need to count a variable in column C from rows 3-5 shown below, because they are all in the same category (2). Number of rows in each category varies greatly. Tried using nested if functions but that doesn't scale.

1 1
2 1
3 2
4 2
5 2
6 3

ideally, would use something like =countif(C"match(...):C"match(...),1) but can't figure out how to or if I can use the match function in place of the row number.

Appreciate your thoughts.